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Ethics
"Let us cultivate our garden." Voltaire, Candide Ethics (ηθική) is the study of right and wrong. The rightness or wrongness of something is called its morality or its moral value. As a discipline within axiology, ethics is the study of moral value. This field is concerned with the morality of actions, people, institutions, beliefs, states of affairs, and other things - where even the possibility that these things have a moral value is an open question for the discipline. In human affairs, problems over the assignment of moral value constantly arise and are frequently the core issues in political or social disputes. A variety of approaches have been taken to such ethical problems. Due to the disagreements in ethics, a description of the field requires both enumeration of the diverse evaluations that people have made about morality and description of the ways those evaluations have been made. A more detailed description adds explanations of how these conclusions may be drawn using these methods. Fundamental Problem of Ethics Morality only inspires investigation in the first place as a result of the disagreement over what is right and what is wrong. Without disagreement over the moral value of something, there would be no reason to study morals. Disagreement over morality may come in a number of forms: # Conceptual disagreement: on the meaning of ethical terms or on the semantics of ethical statements # Substantial disagreement: on the existence and specifics of moral facts # Methodological disagreement: on the procedures for justifying ethical statements All three types of disagreement occur in the more abstract field of meta-ethics, occupied with disagreements over the process of moral evaluation itself. By contrast, normative ethics is concerned with evaluating various things as good or bad, and right or wrong. Different meta-ethical stances are distinguished by agreement on specific conceptions of how to make moral evaluations whereas normative stances are distinguished by the agreement on the moral value of specific things. Prior to confronting meta-ethical disagreement, moral philosophy presupposes a range of things that may be the subject of moral evaluation (i.e. the process of assigning a moral value). Subjects of moral evaluation Numerous things have been considered candidates for moral evaluation: # Action # Intention - a desire of a person to act # Habit - a tendency (or disposition) of a person to act # Expectation - a belief of a person about the future actions of another person # Value - an outcome or state of affairs desired by a person # Relationship - a social relation between multiple persons # Person - an agent or a thing that acts # Systems of (1) to (7) Actions are the core subject of morality - the other subjects only acquire their relevance to morality by relation to actual or possible actions. Most of these relations are clear in how the topics are defined. Although actions are the most fundamental for morality, this statement involves no commitment to ontological dependence (the most reasonable position would be that actions depends on persons and are caused by intentions, making the latter two things either ontologically or temporally prior to actions - none of these points are important here). All actions correspond to intentions but only some intentions correspond to possible actions (assuming people may intend to do the impossible). Similarly, all habits correspond to possible actions, namely actions that tend to be repeated by the same person, as do all expectations, namely actions that another person can perform. Any of these topics may be evaluated by moral standards, if such standards exist. Principal Ethical Questions Some broad questions tend to arise in discussions of morality and goodness. Variations of these questions have been asked by moral philosophers throughout history: * What ought to be done? (What actions should a person take?) * What ought to be valued? (What things should a person desire?) * What ought to be approved? (What actions should a person tolerate or permit?) * What ought to be expected of other people? (What warrants expecting something of someone?) Morality deals generally with the actions, values, and expectations of people. In discussing actions, it is only reasonable to mention intentions and habits since these correspond somehow to actions. Furthermore, it is goes without saying that morality also deals with persons, since the above things only arise with people. These four questions concern the concept of right rather than the concept of good. While the fundamental problem of ethics may be disagreement over what is right and what is wrong, another core issue is whether what is right is prior to what is good or else the reverse is true.Category:Axiology